‘Behemoth!’: Why Tony Gilroy Needed Nine Composers to Score His Latest Film, and a Guide to Who Did What in the Film (EXCLUSIVE)

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for “Behemoth!” in theaters Dec. 4

Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” bowed at the New York Film Festival Friday, and Lincoln Center’s Tully Hall seemed a fitting place to showcase a film about a musician.

Written and directed by Gilroy, the film stars Pedro Pascal as a cellist who returns to Los Angeles after a life on the road. Music is in his DNA — his parents were musicians, as were his grandparents. Music serves as a storytelling device, with Alex’s performances, whether on stage or in films he worked on, triggering flashbacks that reveal why he left Hollywood and what brought him back.

Gilroy wanted distinct scores for each film Alex works on. Rather than rely on a single composer, Gilroy turned to nine composers: Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts and Alan Silvestri, known as the Behemoth Collective, to deliver distinct cues for the fictional movies Alex works on. In doing so, each composer brought their unique voices to the film.

Speaking with Variety, Gilroy explains that he had been sitting with the idea for years. He recalled the first time he walked into the John Williams Scoring Stage, steeped in Hollywood history. “You get in there, and there’s the emotional power and the smell of that room. It’s such a place of work, and then this incredible magic thing happens and there’s no place for the music to go except into the microphones and into your ears. It can’t escape that room.”

He went on to say, “It’s a vivid emotional trigger and I just kept wondering every time I went there — why didn’t anybody make a movie about this? Every time I went, I was like, ‘God, there’s got to be a movie here somewhere.’ I couldn’t figure it out.”

Eventually, he did.

He wrote a script that is a love letter to movie music and the art of scoring, carefully curating a story that allowed him to seamlessly integrate the work of the Behemoth Collective into the film.

Gilroy didn’t want one composer. “I knew I had to have different voices, and once you’re going to open it up, you want to cast it like actors,” he explains. “I made backstories for all the shows, so all the shows have a story to them and I could tell all the composers what the plots of their show were.” With that he started going out to composers. “Henry Jackman was the first one who came on, and he was so enthusiastic from the beginning. He gave me the enthusiasm to keep going forward with it. I talked to some people that I knew. I knew I wanted Michael Giacchino for the cartoon cue. I knew that I’d bring Brandon back,” and so the collective eventually came together.

Variety spoke with all nine composers to break down their cues and the key instruments they used to bring the “Behemoth!” score together.

Michael Abels

Abels was tasked with composing the music for Alex’s solo cello practice sessions. In one scene, Alex practices in a room and the music transitions into a flashback of Alex as a six-year-old prodigy performing Bach’s Cello Prelude No. 1 on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.” Abels explains, “The music morphs from a warm-up exercise into the actual Bach piece.”

Emily Bear

Bear wrote the love theme for “Season of Glass.” She says, “It’s inspired by the French and Italian film scores of the ’60s: a lot of lush strings, beautiful harmonics, a lot of jazz-inspired progressions, but in an orchestral setting.”

Gilroy provided a detailed backstory for the fictional film, describing a young widow, a wealthy East Coast summer setting and a boy preparing to go to war. Bear also wrote a waltz for a scene where the young widow teaches the boy to dance. Bear notes, “It’s this very intimate, slow, tentative waltz that has some contention building underneath, so we added a lot of counterpoint and weird chromatic stuff underneath.”

Lukas Frank

Frank composed the film’s original song, “Your God Is Sleeping,” as well as the “Serian Suite,” which is tied to Alex’s character. “The suite is the underscore that opens throughout. It comes in throughout,” Frank explains.

The prepared piano was a key element of the “Serian Suite.” “There’s someone drilling on a string to make this low droning sound,” Frank notes. “The whole movie opens with the sound of the pedal coming down off the piano, and then some simple strings come in.”

Michael Giacchino

Giacchino wrote music using a standard orchestra for the cartoon “Happy & Slappy,” which Alex’s father composed during his career.

“I had to write a cue that his father wrote for these cartoons back in the ’60s cartoon, similar to ’Tom and Jerry,’” Giacchino explains. The music is used in a scene where Alex watches his brother fight while the cartoon score plays, syncing humorously with the action.

Henry Jackman

Jackman created the music for “Spies Don’t Run,” another fictional film within the story. Jackman describes it as “slightly ‘Jason Bourne-ish’, with a Middle Eastern flavor.”

Jackman’s work involved multiple scoring sessions. But for “Spies Don’t Run,” he took to it seriously and ended up scoring a six-minute suite using “a combination of orchestra, a little bit of slightly abstracted vocals, with quite a lot of heavy percussion.”

Nami Melumad

Melumad contributed the cue for one of the films within the film, “Tolerance Hill.” She explains that Gilroy’s guidance helped shape her approach. “Tony described it as a period film within the story, but it also had to emotionally lead us through Alex, the main character, as he revisits his childhood home.”

Melumad turned to the harp, an instrument Alex’s mother played, to evoke warmth, nostalgia and sadness. “It’s very delicate,” she says.

James Newton Howard

Howard composed the emotional finale of the film. “It’s pure underscore — a solo piano expressing the sadness of what’s happening in the story,” he says. Howard created multiple variations, including a piano-and-cello duet and orchestral arrangements. “It’s where everything comes together,” he notes.

Brandon Roberts

Roberts was tasked with writing “Look Away Jones,” a piece intended to sound like music Alex’s father had written for a TV show. Roberts says Gilroy described it as a “full-on smoking jazz band theme song for this make-believe show about an ex-football star turned detective.”

To prepare, Roberts listened to a lot of Quincy Jones and other theme music from that era. “It was an issue of coming up with a theme that felt like it actually existed and could have been on network television at the time,” he explains.

Roberts collaborated with renowned flute player Katisse Buckingham, who played jazz flute and Tim Liu, who assembled a group of musicians. “They knocked it out of the park,” Roberts says.

Alan Silvestri

Silvestri composed the cue that plays during the scoring session for “Open World,” a big Hollywood blockbuster and is a decoy title for a fictional production called “Behemoth.” It then bleeds from the scoring session into a sequence in the film. Silvestri describes it as a “big caper moment.” He adds, “I approached it as if it were a high-stakes adventure.”

Silvestri used a large orchestra to create a score that played the heist completely straight, despite its humorous premise.